...definitely a permissions thing...had to add myself to the audio and pulse groups to get access to the sound card...they had fixed that once upon a time...so then udev or HAL or maybe systemd...yeah systemd...

... in any case mounting the device and/or the SD card still leaves a permissions issue for Calibre, will just move the file manually for now...

just fyi to anyone who may see similar behavior, Kevin over at Bugzilla provided a work around...my not using GDM was the issue and starting an X session with 'startx -- vt01' instead of just startx did the trick...